Europ Assistance: RePlatforming, Migrating Databases from On-Prem Servers to RDS-MySQL
Challenges
Europ Assistance is a global organization specialized in the Assistance and Travel Insurance covering over 200 countries. Europ Assistance partnered with Searce to Re-Architect, Re-Platform, Migrate and Deploy their PCI-DSS applications and databases on AWS.
The existing Applications were Monolithic with most of the Application code and database components hosted within the same server. As part of migration and modernization, Searce recommended the Europ Assistance team to Re-Architect, Replatform, then migrate their applications, databases and help them deploy the application adhering to all PCI-DSS standards which was one if their primary asks due to compliance requirements.
The EA team needed the following in the new architecture for databases
- Up to 99% SLA on database uptime
- Encrypt data in transit and at rest
- Want to get rid IT of the overhead of managing databases
- Automated Patching and upgrades
- Scaling out and Scaling In whenever required based on load
- Create Read Replicas for reporting
Searce Solution
Searce Team gathered all the requirements from the customer through daily deepdive sessions with EA’s application owners to understand the underlying architecture, functionality of specific components and its features. Post understanding the challenges faced by the EA team Searce suggested the use of AWS Managed RDS instances and migrated the databases following the best practices to ensure the databases are highly-available, secure & robust.
The high level architecture and implementation is as follows:
- Configured Multi-AZ for High Availability
- Encrypted Data at Rest using AWS CMK
- Encrypted Data in Transit by using SSL
- Migrated using Backup and Restore Approach (mysqldump)
- Configured Read-Replicas for Read Intensive queries and Reporting
- Enabled Automated Snapshots with 15 days retention
- Chosen Maintenance Window for automated Patching and upgrades
Business Impact
- Enhanced Database Security
- Reduced the burden of managing the databases
- Achieved 99.99% availability of databases
- Redesigned the architecture helped the team to handle the peak load without any timeout errors
- Helped to achieve PCI-DSS compliance
AWS services leveraged in this deployment
- AWS RDS
- AWS Ec2 for the application hosting
- KMS
- Network Firewall
- Transit Gateway
- Application and Network Load Balancer
- VPC Private endpoints
- AWS Certificate manager for SSL certificates
- CloudTrail
- CloudWatch
- Landing Zone
- AD Connector
- SSO